Moment 126: How To Master The Consistency Of Achieving Your Goals & Sticking To Them: Nir Eyal

In this moment, the behavioural design and productivity expert, Nir Eyal discusses how the belief that you only have a limited amount of willpower is actually a self-limiting myth. Instead, using scientific studies Nir shows that willpower is a limitless resource. Similarly, Nir says the single factor for why you don’t achieve your goals is from the emotion of not feeling like doing the gradual work it takes to accomplish them. It is because of this that you quit and fail. To prevent this, Nir believes you should act now with the same attributes and values you would want in your future self, the future you that has achieved these targets and goals. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/7lsnhHGsUCb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Nir: https://www.nirandfar.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  Just before we started recording, I said to you, I looked up all these time management techniques and I've looked at these diet fads. And there's so many of them because it appears that they, none of them really work without this underlying thing called discipline. So you can have all the, you know, I can time box and I can the one, two, three, four technique and the ABC five technique, whatever. But if I don't have the underlying discipline, then I'm not going to do any of these things. Discipline is such an interesting word. It's, it kind of catches a lot of different things, a lot of psychological forces you've described. But, and this other theory of willpower that's sort of trundled on through the ages, that we have a limited amount of willpower. And if we try and do too many things at once, then we'll do none of them and only take on one bad habit at once. Is there any truth to all of that stuff?

• 0:47Speaker 01

  No. No. Willpower is not a limited resource. At least from the latest research, you know, science is never conclusive, but from what we know today, it seems so. A few years ago, there was this concept called ego depletion. Ego depletion is exactly what you mentioned. It's that we run out of willpower, like someone would run out of battery charge on their phone, right? That it's a depletable resource. And this concept was promoted and kind of widely circulated in the popular press. And there were some fantastical claims made that if you, if you drank a sugar sweetened lemonade, that you would boost your willpower. And it turns out, as often happens in the social sciences, when something sounds a little fishy, we replicate the study. We try and run the study again.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  And Carol Dweck, you might know from, she's probably been on your show, from her book, Mindset, she decided to replicate these studies. She decided to run them again, these ego depletion studies. And she found that the only people who experienced ego depletion, the only people who actually did run out of willpower, like someone would run out of battery on their phone, the only people who experienced that were people who believed that willpower was a limited resource. That's it. So it turns out, I mean, this is incredibly important because it has implications for all sorts of things in our life, right? When we believe that we are somehow deficient, that our brain is broken, that the, that

• 2:11Speaker 01

  the world is conspiring against us to hijack our brains, when we believe these self-limiting thoughts, we act in accordance. And so it's very much the case with this ego depletion myth, that ego is, that our willpower is not limited unless we believe it is.

• 2:28Steven Bartlett?

  And on this point of, because I think the word discipline is somewhat interchangeably used with like willpower. It's doing the thing you said you were gonna do, like, and you intended to do. I was trying to figure out what discipline is and where it comes from. Why in certain aspects of my life, like going to the gym now. So for the last three years, I've gone to the gym about six days a week. Before then, I couldn't. DJing, I've started DJing and I've done that for about 12 months. I've been disciplined with that. This podcast, I've been able to do it. We've released two episodes a week and we have done for a while now. Why am I disciplined in some areas of my life? Why can I continue to show up? And why in other areas of my life is it this kind of failing battle to like, you know, get back on the horse every other week because I've fallen off? I had a hypothesis where I was like, well, with DJing, I have like

• 3:12Steven Bartlett?

  a goal that mean, this is maybe my discipline equation. A goal that means a lot to me. It's worth the pursuit. If I attain it, you know, it feels like it's worthwhile. Plus, the psychological engagement and enjoyment of the pursuit of the goal. So like, I wanna be a DJ, plus the psychological engagement and enjoyment. I love the process of DJing. It's like meditation or therapy, listening to your favorite music for hours, doing nothing other than being in that flow state. Minus, this is where you kinda come in, I guess, is the psychological discomfort or disengagement associated with the pursuit. So for example, if the DJing equipment was up in the spare room and I had to load it

• 3:54Steven Bartlett?

  up every day and it took 35 minutes to do it, and then I had to load up the software every day and it was really difficult, I might find the process not worthwhile and my discipline might wane. When you look at that equation, the why, the enjoyment of the pursuit minus the sort of unenjoyment of the pursuit, does that make sense?

• 4:14Speaker 01

  There's a lot there. I mean, the basics are there. I think what's

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Missing is that you, so with this DJing pursuit, you enjoy it. And so it's not hard to do something you enjoy. This is my problem with flow. You've heard about Meow Chicks, Meow High with the concept of flow, that you can get into this state where time flies and it's effortless. And the examples, if you read the book, many of the examples are from sports. They're from things that people really enjoy doing. And that's like Hollywood. It's nice work if you can get it. How do you get into flow when it's something you really don't want to do? So right now, you enjoy DJing because, to correct me if I'm wrong, it's, you're not doing it professionally, or maybe you are?

• 5:00Steven Bartlett?

  Not really.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  No. So my guess is, right now, as an amateur, it's fun. Stakes are low. You're just enjoying the process. Very much what I used to do when I first started blogging, right? I was just writing for myself. And then I got a few readers and it was kind of fun. Just, you know, it was pure joy. It was pure amateur behavior. And then what happened, when I said, okay, now I want to publish a book, or when you, if you decide to professionally DJ, it's gonna start getting hard, right? Now there's all this other stuff you don't want to do around the core experience, right? Now you gotta figure out, how do I build my brand? And how do I get people packed into my show? And all this stuff that you have to do that maybe isn't as fun. And that's where flow falls down.

• 5:40Steven Bartlett?

  So this is exactly what's happening and happened. So started DJing and then we announced, I'm gonna do a show. We've got 3,000 people to come to this venue. And in the lead up to that, DJing became a lot less fun.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:51Steven Bartlett?

  And even now, so they've, they're trying to book me to do a show in Ibiza and Marbella this year. And suddenly, I'm getting all uncomfortable about DJing again. Because, so when I look at the equation I presented, what seems to have happened in that equation is the perceived psychological cost has increased suddenly. Because now there's like nerves and, yeah, yeah. Now there's like worry and all these other forces at play. And that equation's now out of kilt and my discipline has dropped.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Right. Exactly. Exactly. And so that's where becoming indistractable comes into play. You don't need to be indistractable for something you love doing anyway, right? There's no problem with that. Follow through is easy. It's, how do I do the stuff I know I need to do, but I really don't feel like doing it? If you ask, you know, we talked about earlier, the only reason businesses fail is because they run out of cash. The only reason we fail at our goals, there's only one. The only reason we fail at our goals, because we don't feel like it. I don't feel like it. I don't feel like going to the gym right now. I don't feel like working on that book. I don't feel like whatever it is. It's a feeling. Fundamentally, it's a feeling. Of course, there's outside factors, of course. But in terms of the number one reason we don't pursue our goals, we quit, right? That's the most prominent reason.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  We don't follow through, and that tends to be because of a feeling. So when there are these tasks that suddenly get hard, right, or suddenly difficult, that's when we need different tactics. It's easy to do the stuff we enjoy. It's hard to do the stuff that we don't enjoy.

• 7:13Steven Bartlett?

  So what would you advise me to do then? In the case of DJing, I've got, you know, potentially two shows this summer in Europe.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  So I would start with your values. So what are values? The definition of values in my book is attributes of the person you want to become. Attributes of the person you want to become. So then what you do is you put your values in terms of these three life domains. I look at them as concentric circles. At the center of these three life domains is you. If you can't take care of yourself, can't take care of others, you can't make the world a better place. So in that, when it comes to that life domain, you look at the things that you want to do for yourself, the time you want to spend to become the person you want to become. And you look at your calendar, you look at this blank calendar for the next seven days, and you ask yourself, how would the person I want to become spend their time? And you put that time in your schedule. So time for

• 8:04Speaker 01

  rest, time for reading, time for video games. Doesn't matter. Put that time in your schedule. The next life domain is your relationships. Part of the reason we have this loneliness epidemic in the industrialized world is that we don't have the time scheduled for our relationships like we used to. As the industrialized world became more secular, the church, the synagogue, the mosque, we don't go to these social interactions where we care for others and others care for us. We don't have that scheduled in our day anymore. And I'm not saying, and I'm pretty secular myself, I'm not saying we have to do that, but that is what we have lost because we don't have these regular, what used to be religious institutions. Doesn't have to be real. I mean, Robert Putnam was talking about this in the 1990s in his book Bowling Alone.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  We don't have these regular social interactions like previous generations did. And we need to bring those back. I actually think social media overuse is a symptom, not the cause, of the fact that we don't see people regularly. So you need to put in your calendar time for those relationships. Your friends, your family, your kids, your significant others. You have to put that time in your schedule. Don't give them whatever scraps of time are left over. Put it in your schedule. Then finally, your work domain. This is where most people start. It's actually, I think, where we need to end. Work comes in two flavors. We have what's called reactive work and we have reflective work. Reactive work is how a lot of people, how distracted people spend their days. Reacting to messages, reacting to notifications, reacting to requests, all day long reacting to things. And that's fine.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Everybody's job will involve some amount of reactive work. But if you're not scheduling time for reflective work, you're going to run real fast in the wrong direction. You have to put time in your schedule to think. If you want to do work that is creative, work that requires focus, you have to schedule that time. It's okay if it's only 15, 20 minutes, but that time has to be on your schedule. So to answer your question of, okay, well, what do I do with this, this passion I have around DJing? It's a factor of how much time you want to put into it, based on your values, based on the kind of person you want to become. So what would the Steven you want to become? How much time? Time, first and foremost, not outcome. I think that's the problem with a lot of goal planning.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  This is one of my beef with, with to-do lists. To-do lists are a series of outputs. I want to do this, I want to do this, I want to do this, I want to... And it has no constraint. A to-do list has no constraints. You can always add more. And so what happens? You come home with your to-do list of a million things after you've worked really hard all day long. And most of those things you have not crossed off. So what does that say to your self-image? If every day you come home and all these things still haven't been done after a long day of work? And you haven't done what you said you would do? Loser. So day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, you're reinforcing this self-image of someone who doesn't do what they said they're gonna do. Right? As opposed to a time-box calendar has constraints. Same 24 hours in a day.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  And I don't care if you're Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. You can always make more money. You can't make more time. I think it's exactly flipped. Most people are cheap with their money and generous with their time. I think it should be the opposite. We should be cheap with our time and generous with our money because you can always make more money. You can always make more money. You cannot make more time. So a time box calendar forces you to work with constraints and decide, based on your values, how much time you can afford to spend on whatever you want to do. Because if you put in everything, you'll get nothing. You'll live in regret. Whereas if you say, "Look, I only have four hours a week for DJing endeavors. And here's where I'm going to put that in because I also want to spend time with my friends. I need to take care of myself. I need to take care of my business."

• 11:46Speaker 01

  So it's not based on outcome. It's based on input. So if you went to a baker and you said, "Hey, my kid has a birthday party. I need two dozen cupcakes." Baker's going to say, "Okay, I need flour. I need sugar. I need butter. I need all these inputs. I need these ingredients to make the output." But when it comes to knowledge work, we only think about the output. But what's our input? Our input is just two things: time and attention. Those are our ingredients. That's it. So you can't just think about the output. You can't just think about the cupcakes. You have to think about the input. The input is time and attention. And that, just like ingredients for a cupcake, has to be budgeted for. You have to plan that ahead or it's not going to work out.